Are you certain that search is more important than chrome?

Sure search was their first product, but they have long since pivoted to being an ad company. And while yes, they can show ads along side search, the real cash cow is all the juicy data they can exclusively hoover up through Chrome to better target ads all across the web not just search.

Nope, search ads are still where they make at least 2/3rds of their money. The rest of their ad inventory has substitutes, search really doesn't (because they basically invented the category (grumble grumble something Overture)).

Chrome is okish for collecting data. But they have Android which probably provides 100x the data.

Only on poor people! (I mostly jest, but having talked to a bunch of former Google ad people, it was a real concern for them that most of their high revenue users were moving to iPhone).

And indeed, we are talking about Firefox on android here.